On Edge Street in 1969 ........... waiting for something to happen

This is how I remember Edge Street, which is part of that warren of streets which is now known as the Northern Quarter.

Back in the late 1960s and early 70’s it looked tired and run down, waiting for something to happen.

The street was cut sometime before 1793, and the buildings are a mix of late 18th and early 19th century with some from succeeding decades and pretty much all of them have gone through multiple uses in their long existence.

Leaving aside the trail of litter, the street has that air of neglect, but that might just be because we have caught it on a Sunday, when everyone with any sense was elsewhere.

Of course it is very different today, the whole sale market at the end of the road closed a long time ago and is now part of a residential development, and some of the buildings lining Edge Street were demolished to make way for new ones, while the remainder have changed their use, reflecting the new Norther Quarter.

But the Bay Horse Tavern is still there on Thomas Street, and many of the residents and shopkeepers on this stretch of Edge Street, were not so different from their predecessors in 1911, who included a potato merchant at no. 32, a fruits salesmen, coal dealer, and shop keeper, although I suspect few in 1969 would have understand the need for the Patent Ice Company which operated from no.22.

Location; Edge Street, 1969,

Picture; Edge Street, 1969, Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/albums/72157684413651581?fbclid=IwAR35NR9v6lzJfkiSsHgHdQyL2CCuQUHuCuVr8xnd403q534MNgY5g1nAZfY,

"I had been bull ward in the bull ring, and once kept one of the gamest bulls in the country,” bull baiting on Chorlton Green

Now every so often you come across accounts of the bull baiting that went on in the township.  

The Bowling Green late 19th century

The stories usually appear on a slow week in one of the local newspapers and are nothing more than a reworking of one of the articles by the historian Thomas Ellwood.

Mr Ellwood wrote twenty-six articles during 1885 and 1886 and these were printed in the South Manchester Gazette.

Part of the value of them is that they drew on the memories of people who had grown up at the beginning of the 19th century and who could recall conversations from the generations before who had lived here during the late 18th century.

So building on Mr Ellwood and avoiding the easy route of plagiarism I dug deep into newspaper reports, census returns and the directories which provided confirmation of what went on in the township on the green over 200 years ago.

"Bull baiting was where bull was pitted against dog in a ring hemmed in by spectators. Our bull ring was situated in the centre of the village green.   The bull was fastened to a chain, about twenty yards long, which allowed him enough space to fight.

The dog’s tactic was to try and seize the bull by its nose but if the bull was well practised at the business, he would endeavour to get the dog on his horns, throw him high into the air and the fall would break his neck or back, but to avoid this, the dogs friends were ready to catch him, so as to break the force of his fall.  Eye witnesses often recalled seeing dead dogs which had been killed during the contest left in the ditches and hedge-rows.

The Horse & Jockey early 20th century

If the bull was slow or just not that good, the dog would not only seize him by the nose, but would hold on till the bull stood still, which was termed “Pinning the Bull”. I suppose to give the bull a chance only one dog was allowed in the ring at a time.

Contests were usually staged during the village wakes, and also at Easter and Whit Week.  Naturally the main sponsors for such events were the landlords of the Bowling Green and Horse and Jockey who had the most to gain from a gang of excited spectators outside their pubs.  

Not that they were alone in profiteering from the event.  The owner of the dog which successfully “Pinned the Bull” was awarded a prize and no doubt some went away the richer having bet on the winner.

There were those in the 1840s who could still remember the notable contests and spoke of the victorious bulls like “Young Fury”, son of “Old Fury” who was regularly brought and baited and the “bull men” like Edward Simmer, commonly known as “Ned” who afterwards was converted to a religious life, and finally became a Methodist local preacher.  

The Bowling Green late 19th century

Or John Cookson who at the inquest of Francis Deakin in 1847 had boasted that he “had been bull ward in the bull ring, and once kept one of the gamest bulls in the country.”  

But its popularity was on the wane and for some years it had all but died out before being revived by a butcher called James Moores, from Deansgate in Manchester.  Not that its revival was greeted by everyone.

There were those who had good reason to regret the appearance of James Moores and his bulls because as he travelled south from the city he brought hundreds “of men of the very lowest character to witness the proceedings.  

The sport, if that is what we can call it suffered another blow when Samuel Wilton enclosed the green in 1818 turning it into his garden."*

*Extract from THE STORY OF CHORLTON-CUM-HARDY, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/the-story-of-chorlton-cum-hardy.html

Pictures; The Bowling Green seen from the east from the collection of Tony Walker and the southern side of the Hotel from Alan Brown's collection, both from the late 19th century and the Horse & Jockey from the Lloyd collection early 20th century

My Eltham ………… half a century ago

Now, for all of us who left Eltham, and pretty much never really went back finding pictures of the place in the year we left can be bitter sweet.

On the one hand there are those warm nostalgic memories which are dashed by the changes, which just don’t fit with how you remember the place.

In my case it was the Eltham of the 1960s when I was growing up, attending Crown Woods and discovering the joys and pains of my first girlfriends.

And so when I left for Manchester in 1969 I rather thought the place would still be the same when I came back, which for a while it was, but in my absence, they moved the railway station, obliterated the old bus terminus, replaced Wilcox’s with a McDonald’s and over time closed most of the pubs I took my first illicit pints in.

Along the way they even destroyed the small shopping precinct which held the old Midland Bank, where I opened my first bank account.

All of those lost haunts bounced back today when I came across a series of pictures of the High Street from 1970.

The quality isn’t wonderful, but they are my Eltham, frozen in time, and gone for ever.

They come from Man & Town which was a pack of educational source material aimed at getting kids to look at original historical and contemporary documents.

The idea was rather than tell kids what to think, the documents with a set of briefing notes were aimed at getting them to make judgements about past events and present situations.

The packs were produced by Jackdaw Publications and were very popular in the 1970s, and in the way these things go I bet there will be people who remember using them.

In the case of Man & Town the challenge was to trace how towns develop and the decisions town planners might make to manage change.

Not all the documents were about our High Street but enough were, and interestingly mirrored a real exercise by the planners in the Council who were looking at how Eltham could be changed.

And that is it.

I have chosen just three pictures from the High Street collection, and I leave you to wander back the half century.

Leaving me just to say I did go looking for Jackdaw to ask permission to reproduce the images.

Copyright and seeking permission is important to me, having seen my own stuff lifted and paraded across the internet. 

But after an exhaustive search I am not sure they still exist.  There is what I think is an American company with the same name but they do not appear to be connected to the UK company.

Back copies of many of the packs are still available and command prices between £10 and £20.

Location; Eltham High Street

Pictures; Eltham in 1970, from Man & Town No. 80, courtesy of Jackdaw Publications

Manchester in the September of 1969, memories from the new boy

Manchester sky line the old and new, 1970

Now had I been born just a decade earlier the chances were I would have done my time as a conscript in the army.

As it was at the tender age of 19 in the September of 1969 I arrived in Manchester with a suitcase and an address in Withington and the promise of an academic career at the newly formed Manchester Polytechnic.

There were those at the time and since who have bemoaned the end of National Service, but not I suspect many of the young men who for eighteen months marched and drilled.

Three years after the last world war the Government decided to retain conscription which meant that healthy young men aged between 17 and 21 years old were expected to serve in the Armed Forces for 18 months, and remain on the reserve list for four years.

They could be recalled to their units for up to 20 days for no more than three occasions during these four years. Men were exempt from National Service if they worked in one of the three "essential services": coal mining, farming and the merchant navy for a period of eight years. If they quit early, they were subject to being called up.

The future College of Commerce, 1965

But all that I missed and instead a year later than most of my friends I left home with all that brash confidence of youth to do three years with John Donne, William Shakespeare the odd romantic poet and lots of dead historians.

And fifty-four years later I am still here and hence this occasional series of reflections on the city that adopted me and in particular the places I remembered as a young Londoner in the September of 1969.

Not that this will be one of those sentimental journeys into a comfortable world which was better than now.

Just a few miles from where I read Wordsworth and explored the events of the Industrial Revolution and the complexities  of the French Fifth Republic, the Corporation was sweeping away a century of sub standard housing and coffee meant a lukewarm brown liquid with a hint of beans and a mass of frothy milk.

But there was a buzz about the place.  It was there in those bright new buildings of glass and steel which were going up around the city, the modern station concourses at Oxford Road and Piccadilly and the Mancunian Way.

For me it was the contrasts.  Sitting in the old Milk Maid facing the gardens, there was a panorama of the old Victorian city with its mix of elegant show warehouses, offices and shops while above us was the impressive Piccadilly Hotel.

And yet just a few minutes away were the tiny side roads dominated by shabby industrial buildings where somehow the light and warmth of the sun rarely penetrated.

The City Barge, Rochdale Canal, 1970

Now many of these places I discovered on long walks around the city when we should have been in the library.

I guess Canal Street pretty much sums up those walks.  I was drawn to it because it was close to the college and was bounded by the Rochdale Canal.

Back then both the canal and the street were drab, non descript and a little tired looking.  The attempt at something more exciting was summed up by the City Barge Restaurant in the stretch of the canal from Chorlton Street to Princess Street.

It was of course out of our price range but had the promise of something new and exciting and something to aspire to.

Still we had those wonderful three course meals offered at lunch time in the city centre Chinese and Asian restaurants for just three shillings a head.  Even now fifty six years on I smile at how sophisticated I thought I was when eating Banana Fritter and captivated by the Chinese version of custard.

Looking at the City barge from Princess Street, 1970

Which I suspect is just beginning to border on nostalgic tosh, so I shall close with that more serious reflection that in that drive to bring Manchester into the 1960s there was a serious attempt to sweep away all that Victorian heritage.

And so between new office developments, shopping precincts and traffic flow schemes some fascinating buildings and important bits of our history disappeared.

And more of that serious stuff another time.

Pictures; the new College of Commerce in construction, W Highham, 1965, m64167, and City-Barge-Restaurant Canal-Street, Dawson-A, 1970, m49402, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

On the parish, seeking benefits in the Stretford of 1807

Mary Crowther was just 18 in 1765 when she was removed from Stretford by the authorities and sent back to Chorlton.

They did this under a removal order which gave them the power to send anyone who had settled in the parish without permission back to the place of their birth.  It was a straightforward piece of economics which was designed to root out anyone who might make a claim on the parish for support in a time of need.

And Mary may well have been just such a person.  In 1765 after arriving back in Chorlton she gave birth to the first of three children all born out of wedlock.

In a period of heightened debate about benefits and the drain on the public purse the actions of St Matthew’s Parish authorities might seem all too familiar.

Now Mary’s story has been well covered already*so instead I shall concentrate on some of the other decisions made by the overseer of Stretford.

The years just before and after Waterloo** were hard times and the parish of St Matthew’s responded to requests for help.  So in the year 1810-11, James Mee the overseer regularly paid out between £40 and £90 a month in relief, with the highest sums in the winter months when little work could be done on the land.

But it was always the bastardy payments which feature prominently.

For women like Mary Crowther who had done penance and had had three illegitimate children between 1765 and 1782 there was a greater recognition of the father’s responsibility. Mary could turn to the law for help and although we have no records for Mary there are other recorded cases.    

And it is those from Stretford which throw a light on how unmarried mothers were treated. These are the Orders for Maintenance of Bastard Children, and Bastardy Bonds which identified the adult male who would support the child as well as other miscellaneous Orders Relating to Bastardy. ***for , and across the country many of these records have survived in greater quantities.

They reveal a straightforward system designed to identify the father and bring him to court.  This might begin with an examination of the mother by a magistrate or if she was already in labour by a midwife.  These Bastardy Examinations were common in the early eighteenth century.    Having achieved the information a Bastardy Warrant was issued ordering a Constable to bring the father before the Magistrate.  If the case was successfully made then a Bastardy Order was issued which identified the man and stipulated the amount he was to pay.

The documents were pre-printed with spaces for the magistrates to write the names of the mother and father and the amount that had to be paid.  Some of the Stretford ones for the years 1702-1811 reveal the estimated costs which the father was expected to pay.  

Often the sum was decided on a yearly basis which would then be paid quarterly.  This amount varied and may have been based on circumstances.

The figure of 26 shillings [£1.30p] for the year payable until the child was fourteen appears in some of the Stretford documents but others set an initial payment to cover the birth ranging from £2 down to 10s. [50p] and specify that further payments should be made weekly.

These also varied from 30d [7p] to 7d [3p].   In some cases the mother was expected to contribute and this could be 18d [7p].

Attempting to make sense of these awards is fraught, but some idea of their monetary worth can be gauged by making a comparison with wage rates and some examples of the cost of living.  Just twenty years later in 1830 Mary Bailey and Higginbotham the farmer agreed an annual salary of £7.10s [£7.50] from which she bought  in January a pair of stays which cost 10s.6d, [52p], in May a new cap worth  1s.8d [7p] and in July repaired her shoes for 2s.8d [14p].  The cost of renting on the Row for a farm labourer varied from 10d [8p] to 5s [25p] a week.    Finally the day rate for women workers in the south west was between 7-10d [3p].

Against this backdrop of wages, and spending the magistrates determined that the cost of maintaining an illegitimate child was 7d [3p] a day and this was slightly more generous than the 26 shillings {£1.30p].

So in the year 1807 which seems typical, Catherine Ashcroft received 5/- on April 28th, the widow Pinnington 2/6d and Margaret Thompson 3/-

But the system was flawed and there were many in the early nineteenth century who said so.    The moralists argued that payments to a single mother only encouraged illegitimacy and they may even be evidence to suggest they were partly right.  Both here in the township and in the Parish of Ironville in Derbyshire and no doubt many other areas,  some woman gave birth to a number of children out of wedlock. Their story is also covered in my book.

The next task will be to trawl the records and see what happened to Catherine Ashcroft, the widow Pinnington, and Margaret Thompson.

I suspect that their stories will be like many of the women from Chorlton, who went on to get married, although in the case of Mary Crowther she did not, living out her days with one of her sons in a wattle an daub cottage on the site of the Trevor arms on Beech Road.

And as ever I stand by a correction from Bill Sumner who wrote "The Stretford records you allude to were not in the Parish of St Matthew as that church was not then built, they are the records of Stretford Old Chapel and much more can be read of similar cases in The History of the Old Chapel of Stretford by Sir Bosdin Leech. Charles Walker of Barlow Hall settled later in Longford House Stretford and became Poor Law Guardian for Sretford, he ruthlessly cut down on the number of persons receiving benefit from the town excluding all who were originally from elsewhere".

Pictures, Mary Crowther's gravestone from the collection of Andrew Simpson,  map of Stretford from Greenwoods map, courtesy of Digital Archives, 1818, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/  Bastardy Orders, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

*The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson 2012, the History Press, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
**The Battle of Waterloo 1815
***  St Matthew Overseers of the Poor,  Manchester Archives L89/9/14

Looking out on the High Street with memories of past girlfriends

Even on a Sunday in late October our High Street can be a busy place.

And looking out from the parish church I am reminded of the countless times I stood in the shelter of that entrance waiting for a friend.

More often than not it will have been a girl friend although thinking about it there were only three steady ones.

That said the corner of Well Hall Road and the High Street was a favoured place for me and Jenny to meet up.  In term time she lived in the lodge at Crown Woods and if we were going out to the cinema this was a sensible place to meet.

And this was in that pre mobile age when once the choice of where to meet was made you had to stick to it or suffer the consequences of missing each other and trying to second guess an alternative which otherwise meant mutual recriminations on the Monday morning.

So along with the entrance to Avery Hill and the Wimpy bar this place will always have a special place in my memory.

Picture; the parish churchyard, October 2015 from the collection of Elizabeth and Colin Fitzpatrick

Looking into the future of Eltham High Street in 1975

The High Street in 1910

Now I don’t normally go in for then and now pictures but I have made an exception with these two images from a 1975 document issued by the Council.*

The book was part of a planning consultation and fell through the letter box after I had long left Well Hall for Manchester.

I am not sure what my dad and sister Stella thought of the process, or the ideas but now both the planning exercise and their suggestions  are as much a piece of history as any of the stories I usually write.

The High Street in 1971

So along with the 1970s pictures there is also an insight into how the planners were thinking back then and just how far the bold new world they suggested has come about.

And for me the images have a special connection. Our Stella worked at the library and from 1964 till I left Well Hall in '69 it was a regular venue, along I remember with Marks & Spencer's where I bought my first ever fruit yogurt.

Now that is not only revealing a secret but says so much on the new horizons which were opening up for a lad from south East London.

Pictures; from A Future for Eltham Town Centre, Greenwich Borough Council, Planning Department, 1975

*Of town plans and visions of a future that never quite happened, Eltham in the 1970s and Manchester in 1945.http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/of-town-plans-and-visions-of-future.html